The U.S. Is Even More Guilty Than Pol Pot

(Note: Pol Pot died in April 1998, when the U.S. government was making noises
about "trying" him for "genocide". Nowhere was there any
mention of U.S. support for the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, though this had been well
documented. The following letter was published in The Montclarion (weekly student
newspaper of Montclair State University) of April 23, 1998, page 22, under the title
"The U.S. Is Just As Guilty As Pol Pot".)

To the Editor:

In all the hubbub about the death of Pol
Pot, neither the U.S. government nor the American news media have seen fit to mention that

this mass murderer was supported for fifteen years by the
United States.

the U.S. bombing of Cambodia during 1970-75 killed as many
or more Cambodians as Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge ever did;

"We are not communists ... we are
revolutionaries" who do not 'belong to the commonly accepted grouping of communist
Indochina."(Ieng Sary, 1977, quoted by Vickery, Cambodia: 1978-1983, p. 288).

As for how many were killed by American bombing, Zasloff
and Brown, in Problems of Communism, Jan.-Feb. 1979, write of the "heavy
toll in lives" which "the enormous U.S. bombing and the intensity of the
fighting" caused before 1975, and imply the Khmer Rouge claims of 600,000 to
"more than 1 million" dead are credible. (These two authors are dedicated
anti-Communists who did much research for the U.S. government during the Vietnam War.)

U.S. support of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge is thoroughly
documented in an article in CAQ magazine (formerly Covert Action Quarterly)
by Australian journalist John Pilger, "The Long
Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Pot."* Some quotations from that article:

"The US not only helped to create conditions that
brought Cambodia's Khmer Rouge to power in 1975, but actively supported the genocidal
force, politically and financially. By January 1980, the US was secretly funding Pol Pot's
exiled forces on the Thai border. The extent of this support -- $85 million from 1980-86
-- was revealed 6 years later in correspondence between congressional lawyer Jonathan
Winer, then counsel to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation."

"In 1981, Pres. Carter's national security adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski, said, "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. The
US", he added, "winked publicly" as China sent arms to the Khmer Rouge(KR)
through Thailand."

"In 1980, under US pressure, the World Food Program
handed over food worth $12 million to the Thai Army to pass on to the KR. According to
former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke,'20,000 to 40,000 Pol Pot guerrillas
benefited. This aid helped restore the KR to a fighting force, based in Thailand, from
which it destabilized Cambodia for more than a decade.'"

"In 1982, the US and China, supported by Singapore,
invented the Coalition of the Democratic Government of Kampuchea, which was, as Ben
Kiernan pointed out, neither a coalition, nor democratic, nor a government, not in
Kampuchea. Rather, it was what the CIA calls a 'master illusion.' ... Cambodia's former
ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was appointed its head; otherwise little changed. The KR
dominated the two "non-communist" members, the Sihanoukists and the Khmer
Peoples' National Liberation Front (KPNLF). From his office at the UN, Pol Pot's
ambassador, the urbane Thereon Parish, continued to speak for Cambodia. A close associate
of Pol Pot, he had in 1975 called on Khmer expatriates to return home, whereupon many of
them disappeared."

The United States government pressured the United Nations
to retain Pol Pot's representative as the "official" representative of Cambodia
to the UN, to keep the pro-Vietnamese government out.

During the past year or two the Khmer Rouge guerrilla
forces have begun to disintegrate, and Pol Pot's usefulness to the Western imperialists
has evaporated. Therefore the U.S. government has talked vaguely about putting Pol Pot on
trial for genocide. His death last week spared the imperialists a potentially embarrassing
situation.

What does this all mean for us?

1. There is no substitute for real communism --
egalitarian, anti-racist, based on class interests, anti-nationalist. Pol Pot's
nationalism -- based upon "peasant" radicalism, anti-Vietnamese racism, and
anti-communism -- created a nightmare state in which hundreds of thousands of
Cambodians,including Communists, who had opportunistically entered into an alliance with
them against French and American imperialists, were slaughtered.

2. The western imperialists, the U.S. among them, are the
biggest mass murderers in history.

3. The mass media usually play the role of unofficial
mouthpiece for government propaganda. What they write about communism, "human
rights", and so on, is normally false. Do not drink water from a poisoned well! Don't
believe anything they say.

Grover Furr
English Department

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